Announcements:
1. Nice weather = opportunity for street style blog posting for response paper #9
2. Diary papers due on 5/6
3. Change to reading
4. Electronic CEF pilot in class on Monday, 4/29: bring a fully charged smartphone, laptop or tablet to class.

 

I. Documenting Street Style

A. What drives fashion?

1. Industry or colonial regime?
2. Individual creativity, personal style, or taste?
3. Social convention or custom?
4. Rebellion and resistance?

B. Street Style: An Ethnography of Fashion Blogging

1. Is street style blogging a means to democratize fashion?
2. Trickle up? And trickle farther?
3. Un- or under-remunerated labor that seems unskilled (e.g., Pham on Asian superbloggers)?

C. "Street style blogs, I argue in this book, have significant social and cultural value, documenting the look and feel of specific cities at specific moments in time, and expanding the scope of representation of fashion-related imagery, well beyond the traditional boundaries of the global fashion industry. They also have historic value. Collectively, street style blogs make up the largest archive of personal sartorial expression the world has ever seen" (4).
D. What do street style bloggers do?

1. Take and post pictures
2. Amateurs
3. Hundreds or thousands of them; Luvaas has identified more than 300
4. Critiquing fashion with a more inclusive and expansive notion of style
5. Insider-outsiders: "Street style bloggers have emerged over the past decade as among the most widely viewed content producers of the global fashion industry, even though most of them still see themselves as operating well outside of its bounds" (5).

E. Street style bloggers compared to anthropologists

1. Luvaas learned about them in 2010 in Indonesia; documentation impulse, but with greater range
2. Yvan Rodic, the Face Hunter: globalization doesn't produce homogenization
3. Fashion circulation dynamics, but people as individuals

F. Participant observation

1. Luvaas became a blogger: urbanfieldnotes.com
2. First shooting attempt
3. Attracted followers, product features, press coverage, brand partnerships
4. Autoethnographic, documents the documenter: his "thoughts, feelings, and experiences" (12).
5. Embodied, self-reflexive

G. Who are bloggers?

1. Stereotypes
2. Bloggers in general: between 25 and 44; 1/3 are over 44, about 60% are male, most have some college, nearly half have a post-graduate degree (14).
3. Fashion bloggers

a. Some fashion journalism background, some young, some older
b. Diverse: Asian (Pham); in Philadelphia: over 50% are African American
c. Well educated, middle class
d. Majority of fashion bloggers are women, but also gay men and, recently, "ruggedly straight" men

4. Street style bloggers: 50/50 men/women

a. Heteronormative aspects of hunting and capturing images (e.g., Wim Wenders)
b. Privileged: 39% of the world has access to internet
c. Have computers
d. Cameras and lenses cost $3000 at least

H. Blogipelago (Jodi Dean) versus blogosphere

 

II. Putting the Street and the Photography into Street Style Photography

A. Street as populist versus elitist
B. Modernism

1. Men as wanderers construct modernity
2. Class status: consumerist pleasures and sights
3. The gaze: people watching

C. Documenting the streets

1. "Reality" shaped by aesthetic gaze
2. Late 19th century anthropological photography: Photo from Java
3. Early twentieth century, August Sander: People identified by occupation, category
4. Eugene Atget: candid particularity in place, time, personality
5. Henri Cartier-Bresson: meaningful moments, quick reactions, unposed, no flash, uncropped
6. Street as real and masculine; fashion as hyperreal and feminine
7. 1960s street photography and fashion: Bill Cunningham (d. 2016), NY Times Sunday Style column, "On the Street"
8. i-D , founded by Terry Jones, featured straight ups by Steve Johnston: blank walls, subcultural semiotic guerrilla warfare (e.g., Hebdige)
9. 1990s: street style had become dull

D. 2000s: Global street style

1. Young, hip, ethnically diverse people and global interconnection
2. Harajuku street style, Tokyo
3. Helsinki: Liisa Jokinen started Hel Looks, July 2005
4. Scott Schuman: The Sartorialist, September 2005

 

III. Democratization?

A. Not fashion industry, but people inspiring people
B. Web 2.0: social media, active content producers, not passive content consumers
C. Scott Schuman started to shoot for Style.com and GQ
D. Fashion behind-the-scenes insiders become street style stars
E. Street has many meanings, common and elite: movement, seeing, ordinary, romance, creativity, authentic, stage to perform ostentatiously, to preen and peacock (68).
F. Street style bloggers, like anthropologists, read regular people into the record

1. Chapter 2: bloggers have "overlapping and intersecting" narratives (78)
2. Buenos Aires: anonymous people with style, bricolage
3. James Bent: Asian cities, stylistic mood
4. Nels Frye, Beijing: street is Western construction, but Beijing has islands of bourgeois bohemians
5. Capetown: young, using public transportation, casual style

G. Isolate and classify types, again like anthropology

 

IV. Style Radar

A. Coolness = "a performance of stylized autonomy" (117)
B. Empty mind of chatter, be patient, "know" (121)
C. Style radar = not thinking, but being receptive and then acting decisively to get a photo (124).

1. Affective: visceral feeling, a kind of vital force that we feel but don't consciously register
2. The subject affects you

D. Is style radar a form of habitus?

1. Habitus = how we come to know what we like in ways that distinguish us as members of a particular group
2. Street style photographers tend toward cultural creatives, members of the creative class
3. Class-based reproduction of hierarchical distinctions, such as age and body type
4. Photographers must learn to embody the affective dimensions of this habitus as a way of knowing, thinking, and feeling
5. BUT: habitus is not fixed. It's a process, a becoming, not a being

E. Street style bloggers reflect how people affect us and hence expand the range of style that gets represented in fashion

 

V. Street Style Messages

A. Image versus written clothing: Barthes, redux
B. Luvaas's three questions to his subjects
C. Fast fashion as blank canvas
D. "Whatever" and comfort (physical or social or psychological)